The nature of my business means that I have to be able to communicate reliably from any location on the planet at a moments notice. To meet this requirement I have a GSM mobile phone with a global roaming agreement and five independent ISPs (Internet Services Providers) to give me a wide variety of wire-line access points at home and abroad. This has worked well for me for some time and the service has been more or less uniform for all five ISPs and locations. But recently I was downloading a large file of a mere 3Mbytes when the connection was terminated by 'a network error'. So I started the process again and son received the 'network error' message again. So I changed my ISP connection and the download was successful. I thought no more of this incident, putting the failure down entirely to the ISP concerned, and assumed that they were having some technical difficulties. Then I came across an article on the net detailing a USA based ISP attempting to inflect its own censorship on customers. The prohibition included the downloading of all pornographic material and anything that remotely looked like an MP3 file, presumably to prevent any violation of copyright in the music industry. What then occurred to me was that this might also be happening in the UK with certain ISPs not informing their customers. So I conducted an investigation into this possibility and found that one of my favoured ISPs had now unilaterally, and without any consultation with its customer base, decided to inflict its own moral standards on the material that we are allowed to download via their servers. Specifically they are targeting people who they suspect of downloading MP3 music files. I didn't bother enquiring about the pornographic aspects, but I can imagine that would probably come underneath their mantra as well.

All societies have to make decisions about publication, the spread of information, misrepresentation and the thorny topics of racism and hate mail etc. But in general such decisions are taken by a political machine and not unilaterally or independently by commercial companies. Here we have the first free mode of mass communication available to all peoples across the planet being choked at birth by companies who see fit to inflict their own moral and legal judgement above and beyond those dictated by their own political system. It seems to me that this is highly dangerous and if left unchecked will undoubtedly lead to a stifling of innovation and progress.

I well remember as a young man, the foray invoked by the introduction of audio and then videotape by the music and film industries who spent millions trying to stop both media being made readily available. The outcome was, curiously, that both music and movie sales were enhanced by the free availably of the tape medium. What these people seemed to have missed is that the Internet and hard drive have the ability to revolutionise industries yet again, and take out a physical medium - tape and disc - to create new and far more dynamic markets. The last thing the Internet, and indeed society, needs right now is arbitrary censorship by commercial and moral forces that are unseen and unaccountable. Having thought long and hard about this prospect, I decided to inform the ISP responsible for this unilateral action in the UK that I no longer wished to be a customer of theirs and I have ceased the account. It will be interesting to see if I have an account left at the end of the year.

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